programming

The Dropbox team had a post explaining their decision to use CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript and, in particular, re-writing their existing codebase in CoffeeScript. In case you are unfamiliar with CoffeeScript, it is a language that compiles down into JavaScript, so you have the option to do new development in CoffeeScript while retaining your previous […]

Chris Eargle has a great article explaining that the term “technical debt” comprises both strategic debt and reckless debt: Technical debt accrues interest, and it must be paid back lest the interest payments (lost time) become too high for product maintenance and future development. If immediate business concerns outweigh future business concerns, it makes sense […]

Steve Yegge has a couple of posts (here and here) expounding a new theory of thinking about software engineering. As he says, 1) Software engineering has its own political axis, ranging from conservative to liberal. […] 2) The notions of “conservative” and “liberal” on this political axis are specialized to software engineering. But they exhibit […]

Aaron Swartz has written up a guide for software development from idea to launch. He calls it “The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software”. I was unfamiliar with the word “Pokayoke”, but it means mistake-proofing, i.e., “eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur”. Developing software from zero to […]

One project I have been working on recently is a code upgrade of an existing enterprise web application. It is not a re-engineering effort, but instead only consists of necessary code changes to get the application working with the latest versions of the system software. The application had been in use for several years, and […]

Codecademy has been gathering a lot of attention in recent times with many people, including Mike Bloomberg, pledging to learn code. The high-profile pledges shouldn’t be taken too seriously: they are just friendly endorsements for the well-funded startup that Codecademy is. And some of the others are perhaps well-intended, but the equivalent of New Year Resolutions, […]

I am a little late to this party where Michael Arrington says that startups mean working hard and sleeping under your desk. But I will add a few words. I read a lot of commentary about how such death marches can be counter-productive and ultimately unsuccessful, and also the real dangers they pose to the […]

One thing that always seems to come up when discussing about programming outside of work is the question of what to do when you have a family? Don’t you have responsibilities towards your spouse and children? Don’t they deserve your time? Can you simply lock the door to your home office room and ignore everything […]

Oren Eini (aka Ayende @ Rahien) replies to a job seeker who doesn’t have any source code outside of work: Put simply, we are looking for a .NET developer and one of the most important things that we look for is passion. In general, we have found that people that care and are interested in […]

On the lines of Peter Norvig’s article about teaching yourself programming in 10 years, Mike Lewis (“Apoch”) writes a nice post about how to become a good programmer in just six “simple” steps: Get in it for the long haul. Write Lots of Code. Read Even More Code. Learn Many Languages. Master a Couple. Create […]